CLIMAX, MINN. – Brian Evenson has long lived with outsiders’ suspicions that he had murdered a woman he loved — even wondering at times if he strangled her in the middle of the night, drove home and then forgot about it.
In the four decades since Nancy Daugherty, a 38-year-old mother and nursing home aide, was murdered in her home in Chisholm, Minnesota, investigators have interviewed Evenson 12 times. They collected his DNA, the shirt he wore the last time he saw her, a list of places he left his fingerprints in her house. He was one of the last to see her alive. He was the one who touched her cold, stiff fingers the next day and knew she was dead.
At a press conference in July 2020, Chisholm police and other law enforcement officials said that another man, one who had never been a suspect, had been charged with Daugherty’s murder thanks to advances in genetic genealogy. The cold case was first arrested – Michael Allan Carbo Jr. – after authorities tested the DNA of more than a hundred suspects and thousands of dollars in reward money went unclaimed.
“Oh dear, Finally” Evenson remembers thinking when he saw the news reports.
A jury found Carbo guilty in 2022 in St. Louis County District Court. But he and his lawyers said his defense was hampered because they were not allowed to point to an alternative perpetrator. This month, the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed and sent the case back to district court for a new trial.
That put Evenson back in the spotlight. He is the alternate perpetrator.
The love of his life
“I want to start by saying I didn’t kill Nancy,” Evenson, 74, said recently as he sat at his kitchen table — empty except for a small red-and-blue toy ambulance in the center, a gift from Daugherty when he created the school to become a paramedic.
Evenson lives more than 250 miles from his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, in this Red River Valley town of 243, named after chewing tobacco, according to tradition. He has a small, simply maintained house in a row of houses just outside the center. Fields border two sides of the building. The house is neat, without much decoration.
He works part-time on his cousin’s farm. He has lived here for more than ten years; he plans to retire soon and live here until he dies.
Every day, Evenson said, his thoughts return to Daugherty. He considers her the love of his life. He is detailed and remembers the important dates.
The two met in 1979, but the bulk of their friendship, which turned romantic for about eight months, took place between 1982 and 1986. They were on the same ambulance crew in Chisholm and shared a circle of friends. Some of their best times, Evenson said, were just sitting across from each other and talking.
Daugherty was a softball player, a skier and a sunbather. She enjoyed fishing and camping. She had plans to move to the Twin Cities and go to school to become a paramedic. She was adored at Heritage Manor Nursing Home, where she was an assistant.
It was easy to be with her, Evenson said. “Just now [her] way of looking at things. It was so refreshing,” he said. “And just kindness, what a heart.”
Beyond investigators and a courtroom, Evenson has stuck to the story of Daugherty’s last night alive and finding her dead in her home. He hasn’t told new friends or even his immediate family. He contacted the Star Tribune after the Supreme Court ruled on Carbo’s retrial; he wanted to break his silence.
Evenson had left the Iron Range in the summer of 1986 and was a paramedic in Appleton, Wisconsin. He and Daugherty kept in touch through phone calls and letters. The letters would turn up during the investigation: handwritten messages that talked about his life, reminisced about old times and expressed frustration that she did not often write back.
Evenson got the itch to return to the Twin Cities area. After a job interview in White Bear Lake, he drove to the Hibbing-Chisholm area to see family and friends, including Daugherty.
Evenson stopped by her house and they hung out for a while. Daugherty received a call which she answered calmly, without commenting on who was on the line. Then the two went to Tibroc, a pizzeria and bar in the center of Chisholm, for a few hours.
Evenson took Daugherty home around midnight, used her bathroom and lingered until she said she was tired. He then drove to his parents’ house in nearby Hibbing, where he spoke with his sister and father, drank a glass of milk and went to bed.
A bad feeling
Evenson was ready to help Daugherty move the next morning. When he arrived at her house, he found the curtains drawn and the door locked – unusual for her, or anyone else in this town in the mid-1980s. He tried to call. There was no answer. During the day he returned repeatedly.
A neighbor intervened. He told Evenson that his teenage daughter and her friend, who had been at a party, heard fighting coming from Daugherty’s house early that morning. Evenson discreetly contacted his mother, who worked in the emergency room.
He asked if she had seen anyone he knew the night before. Her ‘no’ caused a bad feeling.
Evenson and the neighbor called Chisholm police. Daugherty’s car keys were found in the grass. Inside the house, her glasses were on the kitchen floor.
They found her in her bedroom, lying under a blanket. She had been raped and strangled.
Forty years later, the memory still brings Evenson to tears at his kitchen table.
A dark-colored truck and DNA
Carbo, whose DNA was found in Daugherty’s body and under her nails, and whose vomit was found in the yard, was convicted two years ago in Hibbing. He was 18 when Daugherty was killed and lived within a mile of her home. His defense team argued that the two had consensual sex, but that Carbo left afterward and did not kill her. His DNA was the only DNA found at the scene.
Carbo was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. He is housed at the state prison in Rush City.
“To the children and family of Nancy Daugherty: I did not kill Nancy,” Carbo said in a prepared statement during the trial. “I obviously had sex with her, but I don’t remember.”
In their appeal, Carbo’s attorneys said the girls who heard the fight at Daugherty’s home saw a dark-colored truck parked outside in the middle of the night. Evenson was driving a gray Ford Bronco II at the time. Daugherty was missing one of her earrings, which was a gift from Evenson. Had he taken it as a sign after killing her?
Evenson was obsessed with Daugherty, the defense team argued in court documents, and believed she had made plans to go out after he left her that night.
More than a decade after the murder, Chisholm’s then-Police Chief Scott Erickson asked Evenson if perhaps he had lost his temper that night and not realized what he had done.
“You know the human mind is a strange thing, and I’ve often wondered: Did I wake up in the middle of the night, drive over there and kill her, go back to bed and not know?” Evenson told Erickson, according to court documents.
Evenson has answers to the accusations. Carbo’s father had a dark-colored truck. He says he wasn’t obsessed and jealous; he and Daugherty were friends. He has maintained his innocence and the same story from the beginning.
“If there was evidence to show that, I would have been arrested a long time ago,” he said.
Although the defense was not allowed to use an alternative perpetrator defense, Evenson’s identity and backup information about him were vaguely referenced during the trial. When he read the transcripts of the trial, he was surprised how often it came up.
Evenson describes this as “nonsense [Carbo’s attorney J.D. Schmid] spat on me.”
The new process promises to go deeper.
“The Supreme Court’s decision gives jurors a much more complete picture that someone else did it,” Schmid said.
Daugherty’s family doesn’t want to go through another trial. Dave Haggard said the trial feels like his wife’s mother being murdered again. The family says they believe Carbo is guilty and there was never enough evidence to charge Evenson.
“Brian was probably prosecuted more than anyone in this state,” Haggard said. “In most crimes, the last person to see her is the one who did it. He was never even taken to jail.”
Evenson lives with decades of questions to which he may never learn the answers.
“Who called her that night?” he asked. “And what happened between 12:45 and 3:15?”
